Charter for GNU Herds (draft)

Title

The name of the Association shall be GNU Herds, to be known publicly as GNU Herds - Free Software Association.

Aims

The aims of the Association shall be to assist and encourage people in their paid work as Free Software authors, getting the highest levels of competence and efficiency.

Membership

There shall be two kinds of members, voting members, to be known simply as a member, and non-voting members, to be known as an associate member.

All members must subscribe to the purposes of GNU Herds and adhere to the Code of Ethics at the penalty of their membership being revoked.

To qualify for voting membership one must show a contribution to the Free Software movement.

Voting memberships and associate memberships are both free of charge. However, voting memberships expire yearly but they can be renewed.

Committee

The Committee shall consist of the following: the members of the system administrator team, the web master team, the development team, the translator teams, the public relations team and the Ethics Officer.

The Ethics Officer will be appointed by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. to ensure the below points:

  • The integrity of the GNU name is not breached.
  • The Association follows the Free Software philosophy.
  • The activities are operated in ways that do not lend themselves to be abused to the detriment of the Free Software philosophy.

To depart from the above GNU requirements the Association have to discuss it previously with the GNU Project. Any conflict which can not be resolved in the discussion will raise the removal of the GNU Project approval, and so the GNU part of the Association name.

All other officers will be elected by the membership.

An Office term will be 4 years. All committee positions are voluntary, an officer may step down at any time. After 6 months if the membership is dissatisfied with an officer they may vote her or him out of office.

Decisions

The goal of the committee is to administer the Association and execute the decisions taken by the members. Therefore, all decisions will be voted upon by the membership.

Voting

In addition to the issues at hand in a vote, the option to abstain, delegate your vote to another individual, and delegate your vote to the committee shall be present. Through membership options a member can set one of these to be the default if they do not vote. The option will initially be set to abstain. Officer elections, amendments or dissolutions may not be delegated.

Guidelines:

  • Do not vote on technical subjects. Just discuss it to get the best technical solution. Only if the time needed for discussion is too long should there be a vote.
  • Vote on non-technical subjects.

See the e-Voting Special Interest Group section. We could work on the design of the official voting mechanism.

Special interest groups

Groups will be formed at the discretion of the committee based on the demand within the membership.

Amendments

Any member may motion for amendments to this Charter for any reason. All proposed amendments will be put to a vote of the general membership.

Dissolution

The committee may motion for dissolution of the Association if they feel it is no longer serving a useful purpose. Upon the motion being passed 75% of the membership must vote in favour of dissolution for it to occur.